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South African National Parks offers a variety of accommodation types and standards. Prices are
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National parks offer visitors an unparalleled diversity of adventure tourism opportunities including
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As we had a marvelous trip in 2012, I was wondering, what this trip will provide. Could we be that lucky again?

That trip report ended with:

I guess, now we have to return to find the honey badger, porcupine and whistling rat. I would not mind aardwolf and aardvark either. On the other hand I will enjoy anything that we will see.

Have we been successful?

This trip was slightly different from last years trip as we did not see as many small animals

- We saw no bat-eared foxes- Charlie Fax was the only cape fox clearly spotted- We saw less yellow mongooses - We did not have a good meerkat sighting- we did not see any black-shouldered kites

We expected it to be cold but it turned out to be very hot during the day most of the time.

Unfortunately, we reached two big disappointments as well

1. We did not see a single yellow ribbon. Fortunately two mites and two guests approached us, though. For me it is always a pleasure to meet a mite in person but how could I recognise one without the ribbon?

2. Bird baths are no longer allowed at Grootkolk. I was so much looking forward to spend the day time hours watching the birds but without the baths there were hardly any birds around. Obviously this was caused by the complaint of a tourist who is allergic to bee stings, which is quite understandable. But in my opinion the bee problem is not solved by this. Last year the bees stuck to the water bowls. This year it was worse as they were all over the place looking for water.

We left home at about 11:15 am as our flight was scheduled for 3:25 pm. Close to the airport I saw a grey heron at a pond which I took as a good omen as seeing a „south african“ bird still being at home could only mean we will have great sightings.

Although our flight was delayed by 20 minutes, we arrived in Dubai in time. As always we went straight to the Irish pub where we spent the five hours between our flights. As internet is available there, this was our last opportunity to catch up.

We arrived in Jo’burg at 10:30 am. Immigration went smoothly and at 11:30 am we entered the car rental office. As the international air fares have gone up quite a bit we decided not to fly to Upington but drive there and save some money this way.

The clerk was new and had never dealt with international customers before. Thus it took a little bit longer to do the paperwork. When it was finally done, the manager noticed that the key fort he cab of our car was missing. He told us it would take about 10 minutes to get another car to the airport. As we still had to buy a new phone card this was no problem. We went back to the airport and returned about 30 minutes later. Unfortunately the clerk only then started to do the paperwork a second time. Thus it was already 2 pm when we left the airport.

Our original plan was to drive to Kuruman or at least to Vryburg and stay there over night. As the landscape was very boring we realised that we were very tired. Amazingly we saw many birds on the way, but at 120 kmh I only could id northern black korhaan, blacksmith plover, swainson’s spurfowl and hadeda ibis

At 5:30 pm we only had arrived at Delareyville. At the end of town there was a sign pointing out a lodge. We checked it out and decided to stay.

and were ready for breakfast at 7 am. We left the guest house at 8:15 am and continued to Vryburg. I asked the SO whether we had to fill up but he said the tank is still half full. Halfway between Vryburg and Kuruman the fuel light went on. Oh, oh, we were in the middle of nowhere. We stopped a car on a sideroad and were told that the next petrol station is in Kuruman. Thus we continued with 90 kmh to save petrol.

At the stop and goes before Kuruman I had a chance to take some pictures of the pied crows who were around in abundance

and an ant-eating chat

Our first stop in Kuruman was at the petrol station of course. Puh,what a relief that we made it.After seeing a lot of mines before Olifantshoek

the landscape got nicer now

In Olifantshoek we found this interesting road sign

The last stretch to Upington it was really nice

We arrived in Upington at 2:30 pm and checked into our guest house

where we were greeted by the locals

At 3:30 pm we went to the car rental office at the airport and tried to exchange our car. We had a Nissan which used a lot of unleaded petrol – as we found out the hard way. Furthermore, the 4th gear only worked when it was up to it, the 4wd was not working properly and the car had no power. It was no problem at all to exchange the car and we left quite happy with a Hilux which turned out to be much better.

The next stop was the new shopping mall. We were lucky and got two cooler boxes and a flask at special opening prices. Then we did the rest of our shopping at the Super Spar. But when we went to the meat section, we realised that they do not have a good selection there. As it was already 6:45 by now, we returned to the guest house and went for dinner at a restaurant.

After breakfast we checked out. At reception we enquired about the cooler box we had left here last year. We had sent an e-mail asking about it before but only received a reply on september 30th (coincidence?). It turned out that the box had disappeared. We already had expected this and bought the new ones.

We bought some more bread at the shop and left for Urikaruus at 10:45 am.

We got a short glimpse of some meerkats

Close to Auchterlonie we saw some lazy cheetahs on the other side of the riverbed who were spotted in the area the days before as well. Today we know it was Elena with her cubs.

At 2:30 pm we arrived at Urikaruus. At first, I was disappointed that unit 3 was allocated to us as I have read that this ist he worst unit. But having seen it, I disagree. It has a much better view than no 4.